Could the Yankees find their next Cam Schlittler breakout prospect?

Baseball America released their top 30 lists for teams including the Yankees, and there’s some fun names who got a big boost in their standing.

Mac Heuer, the team’s eighth-round pick out of Texas Tech, was one of the biggest risers as he went from not being ranked out of the draft to being no. 12 in their organizational rankings.

Despite a poor collegiate ERA, there’s a lot of helium for Heuer who has hit up to 98 MPH on the radar gun, and his path could be very similar to what we saw from Cam Schlittler in 2025.

With the potential to add velocity in the same way that Schlittler did, Heuer could be the Yankees’ biggest breakout prospect of the 2026 season.

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Why Mac Heuer Fits the Yankees’ Organization Philosophy Perfectly

When the Yankees make their draft selections, especially on the pitching side, they often gravitate towards underlying metrics, physical traits, and other variables that cannot be captured by surface level information.

Mac Heuer had a 6.28 ERA in 14 starts and struck out just 19.8% of batters faced, but the Yankees see a pitcher who could take some massive steps forward in his first offseason with the organization.

Listed at 6’5 and weighing in at 265 pounds, Heuer is a big hurler who leans into that aspect of his game, but he isn’t maximizing his frame and power in order to get elite velocity and backspin.

Despite generating over 2,500 RPMs of spin on his four-seamer, not all of that spin goes towards movement as sometimes Heuer will cut the ball, getting around it instead of fully behind it.

This is the same issue that Cam Schlittler had as a prospect, as in the two years where we had some Minor League data on his four-seamer, you could see a serious gap between the spin of the ball and the vertical movement.

At the Major League level, Schlittler’s fastball averaged 16.3 inches of IVB, and the increase in velocity could be tied to how much more force he’s generating through the ball rather than around it with the heater.

The Yankees have helped pitchers such as Clarke Schmidt, Michael King, and Will Warren improve their four-seam fastballs over the last 4-5 years, getting pitchers who naturally get around the ball to stay behind it for backspin.

Heuer’s fastball averages about 16-18 inches of IVB with the college ball but there’s a lot of variance in his shapes on a pitch to pitch basis, something I imagine the Yankees want to clean up.

If they can get him to generate more backspin by altering the grip of his four-seamer to keep him as a pitcher with plus ride on their heater, but they could also see a spike in velocity doing this.

As with Schlittler, pitching through the ball rather than around the ball is how you generate more zip, and we could see the right-hander sit around 95-96 MPH with plus shape and extension in 2026.

Cam Schlittler was the 220th overall pick in the 2022 Draft, a seventh round pick out of Northeastern while Mac Heuer was the 254th overall pick in the most recent draft as an eighth rounder.

The Yankees have found tons of value in the middle rounds of the MLB Draft over the last few seasons, and Heuer has the physical traits and raw pitching talent to take off in this system.

He already throws a cutter, slider, and changeup, and if the Yankees can finetune the secondaries on top of getting that more consistent fastball grip, this could become one of their 5-8 best prospects by season’s end.

New York has become one of the best organizations at pitching development, and they could hit big with the 21-year-old right-hander with huge potential.